URGE Pod of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS) at Cornell University
In the spring of 2021, a group of EAS department members formed a ‘pod’ to participate in the NSF-funded Unlearning Racism in Geoscience (URGE) curriculum [https://urgeoscience.org/]. URGE organized a series of biweekly readings and expert interviews aimed at deepening our knowledge of the effects of racism on the participation and retention of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people in Geoscience. Pods from over 300 institutions around the world participated.
The pod produced a set of ‘deliverables’ in which we considered ways to make department policies more anti-racist; these can be found online [https://urgeoscience.org/pods/cornell-earth-and-atmospheric-sciences/]. The pod continues to work on how these ideas can be integrated into the policies and practices of the department, and welcomes all interested participants.
How to create good scientific figures for presentations and publications
Principles of scientific figures:
- As self-explanatory as possible. Include panel titles, axes labels with units, legends within panels, annotations, etc). Goal: other people should be able to (and want to) use your figure copy+paste in a talk of their own.
- Color schemes. Avoid ‘jet’-type colorbars. Use divergent colorbars for anomalies. Choose consistent colors throughout a study. Colorblind-friendly colors.
- Figure font sizes should not be smaller than the smallest font in the typeset paper (often caption).
- Make vector-based figures (.pdf, .eps, .svg) rather than raster-based figures (.jpg, .png). If you do make raster-based figures, make them high-resolution (150+ dpi).
Short guide to creating figures in python by graduate student Yan-Ning Kuo (May 2025).